launching soon + more previews
so the entire team has been working super-hard and overtime to get the new site launched. so far we have:
- added a bazillion (kiela’s estimate, which, according to her, is “rounded up to the nearest bazillion”) beauty products with swatches to our site
- set up the new server
- built an entire new site for our beauty products
- fixed 60% of open bugs and implemented the majority of required new features for (3)
- made some cool stuff we’re pretty proud of
- not killed each other
chris and i are working on the software part. as we fix and build closer to launch, we keep finding new little bugs and requirements. work work work.
one thing we’ve found is that we both like to work on new things, and we both don’t like fixing bugs so much. a programmer’s world is filled with a good deal of boring tasks and then a few golden tasks that she or he actually loves. the trick is balancing those. we always have one pet project that we work on in one branch of the project tree while we are simultaneously working on fixing tasks that need to be done but aren’t so fun. we monitor ourselves to we don’t end up working too much on the fun things, ignoring the boring things. as deadlines creep up, or right after bug meetings (when it sinks in just how much needs to be done), we usually sway more towards working on the boring but important tasks. i have found that, personally, the majority of the little boring tasks get done between 5 and 6pm, right before the office closes — that’s because i check the bug list and notice i haven’t been “productive” for most of the day.
you don’t care about our boring tasks. but do you want to see some of the fun things we’ve been working on?
well i’ve been working on some of the new designs for our new store which we’re internally calling “/beauty” because the address is well.ca/beauty:
robin, kate and kiela have basically finished entering in what i think is like 2000 new products each with tens of hand sampled and hand typed colour swatches (amazing job, dudes). yeah this is what we’re most excited about; you’ll hear more when we actually launch.
but did you notice something new in the top right-hand corner? no you didn’t, but it’s still the greatest thing ever: chris has been working for the last couple days on a totally re-done shopping cart that resides on every page. check out a screenshot (it’s not done yet, we need to get a graphic for “checkout”):
as you can see from the screenshot, the shopping cart will display an estimated shipping cost on every page — saving our user’s time if they want to know how much the final price will be without having to go through the arduous process of creating an account, etc. (yeah, we’re working on making that simpler too!). you might also notice the neat little canadian and american flags to select your country. a big improvement from our ugly drop-down box. great job chris! (and please don’t kill me for releasing this sneak preview without asking you first… oops.)
my baby for the last while has been that neat jquery-accordion menu i was working on. here’s what it is looking like right now:
an accordion menu lets us display more information in our menus in less space. it’s so easy to use — i really don’t like flyout menus on webpages because they can be finiky.
want to see one more funny thing? check out this funny animated gif of what may one day happen when you add a product to your cart:
heheh. hope you like it! that’s all i have to show you for now. i need to get back to work!
by the way, i implemented a new rule at work where if anyone says the phrase “greatest thing ever” (which i do a lot myself), the thing shown must really be the greatest thing ever. i think i will have to add this to the list of failed rules i’ve tried to implement at work. other past failures include:
- forcing all sentences, both spoken and written, to end in exclamation marks (!)
- silent tuesdays
- bring your plants to work day